Member-only story
My Word Count Is My Enemy
No one is going to read my eight-minute-long story so why am I still tinkering with it?
I have two drafts that I have been tinkering with all week, and one of them has become an epic beast of such verbose proportions I am ready to bin it entirely.
What started as a specific, cute(ish) idea, that should have been a short and sweet type of piece, is now somehow a treatise on all sorts of tenuously related things. It’s a fracking mess, frankly.
I have deleted whole chunks, only to add in more verbal diarrhea. It’s a writer’s worst monster nightmare, come to life.
I do think I have a point, and there is good stuff in it, (uh, maybe) but at what point do you call it a day on something that isn’t hingeing together? I have probably spent 8 hours of my life on it, easily, and it’s so overlong and not delivering exactly what the title promises that it probably (rightly) would earn me 13 cents if I am lucky.
I can’t come up with any forking final thoughts because that will probably tip me over into a ten-minute read at this rate and literally no one wants to read that (no offense to anyone who writes long articles well, I do think it can be done but in this case it is very much a runaway train). It doesn’t even have sections or subheadings or any of that “Medium jazz”.
